"The 1967 Outer Space Treaty is inadequate to govern 21st-century military uses of outer space." Critically examine, with reference to recent developments.

The Outer Space Treaty (OST), 1967 bars only weapons of mass destruction in orbit and reserves celestial bodies for peaceful purposes [1]. In September 2026, the US Secretary of the Air Force publicly announced deployed "on-orbit space control weapons" [2] — exposing how far orbital warfare has outrun this Cold War text, though the treaty is not wholly obsolete.

What the OST still delivers

• Its WMD ban has held for nearly six decades — no nuclear weapon has been stationed in orbit; non-appropriation, state responsibility and "province of all mankind" remain universally accepted norms [1].
• It supplies the legal baseline against which every current allegation and negotiation, including PAROS, is framed [3].

Where it falls short

• Silence on conventional weapons: kinetic, directed-energy and co-orbital systems are unprohibited — precisely the gap the 2026 "space control" deployment occupies [2].
• No verification or debris discipline: ISRO records 3,665 objects added to the tracked population in 2024, one Long March upper-stage break-up alone contributing ~650 pieces, forcing 10 collision-avoidance manoeuvres from over 53,000 close-approach alerts [4].
• Dual-use blindness: drafted for state programmes, it cannot address commercial satellites serving military users, straining International Humanitarian Law's civilian–military distinction.
• Ground-launched ASATs — including India's Mission Shakti (2019) [5] — lie entirely outside its scope.

Yet the deeper deficit is political, not textual

• The UN Security Council failed in 2024 to adopt a first-ever PAROS resolution after a Russian veto [3]; new text cannot pass where old text is contested.
• Verification is unsolved: a robotic arm that services a satellite can also disable one — the core objection to the China–Russia PPWT.

Thus the OST is under-inclusive rather than redundant. India, which favours a multilaterally negotiated binding instrument [6], should pursue verifiable increments — a moratorium on destructive ASAT testing, agreed rules of behaviour on close approaches, and independent tracking via ISRO's IS4OM [4] — extending the treaty's founding promise that space serves all humanity.